"Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency on Saturday and imposed an overnight curfew, telling a group of shouting residents that order must be restored.... The governor said he had signed an executive order imposing the extraordinary measures in an effort to find a balance between the protesters’ First Amendment rights and the community’s safety."
That's what all tyrants have said (frown).
Related: The Ferguson Fraud
This whole thing, however it got started, has been meant to be used as a test in case -- in the heartland of the homeland -- and just before a 9/11 anniversary, too. How suspicious.
Getting martial law in place for something truly terrible, a nuclear 9/11 in Obwama's hometown? Script already written and ready to transmit to the networks like 13 years ago, or....?
And operating under a basic rule, the more print and pre$$ an issue gets, the more it is a priority at the moment for the mouthpiece and tho$e they $erve:
(I want to preface this by saying I dread going to the web version because of all the shell-game censorship and rewritten, reedited "updates." What's up with that?)
"Missouri declares emergency, orders curfew" by DeNeen L. Brown, Wesley Lowery and Jerry Markon | Washington Post
Sigh.
"Midnight Curfew in Effect for Ferguson" by JULIE BOSMAN and ALAN BLINDER AUG. 16, 2014
FERGUSON, Mo. — Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri on Saturday imposed a midnight to 5 a.m. curfew in this small city, declaring a state of emergency as violence flared anew after a week of street protests over the killing of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer.
Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency on Saturday in this roiling St. Louis suburb and imposed an overnight curfew, telling a group of shouting residents that order must be restored after days of protests over the killing of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer.
That's two different papers, two different bylines, same emphasis. Case closed.
“This is not to silence the people of Ferguson, but to address those who are drowning out the voice of the people with their actions,” Mr. Nixon, a Democrat, told reporters and residents at a Ferguson church. “We will not allow a handful of looters to endanger the rest of this community. If we’re going to achieve justice, we must first have and maintain peace.”
Agenda-pushing agent provocateurs. Seen this movie so many times.
Mr. Nixon added: “This is a test. The eyes of the world are watching.”
Yes, we are.
The governor’s extraordinary action came as the lawyer for a key witness described the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown as an execution-style slaying. Attorney Freeman Bosley Jr. said Dorion Johnson, a friend of Brown’s, has told the FBI that Officer Darren Wilson confronted the two because they were walking in the middle of the street.
Wilson cursed at the pair and ordered them onto the sidewalk, Bosley told The Washington Post. When they refused to comply, he said, the officer grabbed Brown’s throat through the window of his cruiser, pulled out a pistol and shot him. Wilson then chased Brown, shot him in the back and shot him five to six more times as Brown’s hands were raised, Bosley said.
What about the stolen cigars?
As the curfew took effect, heavy rains began to fall and the streets, which had been filled with people less than an hour before, were largely deserted.
The account, combined with Nixon’s declaration, made for another day of chaos and confusion in this small community, which has been whipsawed for days as police initially put down protests in a paramilitary fashion, then vowed cooperation with demonstrators and are now cracking down again.
Wow. Globe fed me a whole shovelful of public relations propaganda yesterday.
Capt. Ronald S. Johnson, the state Highway Patrol commander whose officers have overseen public security in Ferguson since Thursday, did not say how long the curfew would be in force or whether violators would be arrested.
With tensions rising, it was unclear how authorities would enforce the midnight to 5 a.m curfew and whether it would stop the rioting that resumed late Friday, with protesters looting stores and clashing with police wearing riot gear and deploying tear gas.
The announcement prompted cries of protest and anguish from some members of the public who attended the news conference, with many of them arguing that a curfew would lead only to new and fierce confrontations. Some people begged to be able to go into the streets themselves to try to calm any violence. But Captain Johnson said the curfew would be put in place and enforced.
“We won’t enforce it with trucks, we won’t enforce it with tear gas, we will enforce it with communication,” Captain Johnson said. “We will be telling people, ‘It’s time to go home.’ ”
That's the solution, and I agree. Don't protest a damn thing in AmeriKa. Accept the benevolence of authority, salute smartly, and carry on. See what the wealthy or political cla$$ need from you, then just go into your hovel and enjoy your freedom. That's what the torch-bearer of the people thrown out in front by authority says.
This government loves you, don't you know that?
Clusters of protesters remained standing in a parking lot after midnight and officers slowly walked down West Florissant Avenue, a hub for demonstrators in recent days, in their direction. Other officers, in riot gear, stood in a line in front of businesses that had previously been looted. As the curfew took effect, police radio traffic crackled with reports of demonstrators in other locations.
Mr. Nixon announced his decision at the Greater St. Mark Family Church, near the site of the unrest. The news conference quickly became frenzied, with the governor and Captain Johnson confronting a volley of aggressive questions, most of them from residents.
Almost like -- dare I say -- Hamas rockets?
The anger still coursing through the community was visible at Nixon’s news conference on Saturday. The governor said he had signed an executive order imposing the extraordinary measures in an effort to find a balance between the protesters’ First Amendment rights and the community’s safety.
Noting that most protesters on Friday night had been peaceful, Nixon said he ‘‘cannot allow the ill-will of the few to undermine the good will of the many, while putting the people and businesses of this community in danger.’’
“This is not to silence the people of Ferguson,’’ Nixon said, ‘‘but to address those who are drowning out the voice of the people with their actions. We will not allow a handful of looters to endanger the rest of this community.’’
But after his opening remarks, Nixon quickly lost control of the crowd, with the images being recorded for a national television audience.
‘‘You need to charge that police with murder!’’ one person yelled. Others demanded to know how the curfew would be enforced. ‘‘Going to do tear gas again?’’ someone asked.
Nixon began answering that ‘‘the best way for us to get peace’’ was for everyone to go home and get a good night sleep.
That would do me better than a Globe, which I was late getting today. Woke up real late. Cold and cloudy, that's why. Fall is coming, sun rising later and later now.
It came a week after the death of Michael Brown, 18, who was shot by Officer Darren Wilson.
Oh, yeah, him. What about the cigar-stealer?
The police said that Mr. Brown had been stopped for walking down the middle of the street and that a scuffle had ensued, ending in gunfire; other eyewitnesses have disputed that account.
At times, Mr. Nixon and Captain Johnson both appeared chagrined by the spectacle, the governor curtly telling one prospective questioner, “I’ll let you yell at me next.”
Me, too.
Mr. Nixon described the looting and violence as the work of an isolated few, but emphasized that a curfew was necessary to restore order in a community where residents have complained that basic services, like summoning an ambulance through a 911 call, have been disrupted by the protests.
Damn protesters!!
“Small groups took to the streets with the intent of committing crimes and endangering citizens,” Mr. Nixon said after he praised “the courage and resolve of peaceful protesters.”
I smell agent provocateurs among you. Call 'em out!
The curfew came under quick attack from some people in the church and from protesters whom Captain Johnson credited with assisting the police in maintaining order.
“Right now, I want to make sure that my people don’t get hurt tonight,” said Malik Z. Shabazz of Black Lawyers for Justice. He said his group would bring a lawsuit challenging the treatment of Ferguson residents by the police in the initial days of turmoil.
He added: “It’s Saturday night. Midnight is an early time, and I have to be able to go to my people with credibility in order for them to come out of those streets. Twelve midnight is early. I cleared it Thursday at 1:30, no problem. But if I can get till 1:30, 2 tonight, it would all go peacefully, no problem. Twelve midnight is a problem.”
Some residents shouted at the governor, including one man who said, “We will not get sleep until we get justice for Michael Brown!”
Another man shouted, “Sleep is not an option, Governor Nixon!”
I can't avoid it. it's one reason this blog is sh**; another is the shell game censorship burning up time.
Steven W. Hawkins, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement: “It’s hard to build trust if the governor doesn’t meet with community members and restricts their movements with a curfew.”
Let me tell you something: Americans have LOST TRUST in this GOVERNMENT and its ma$$ media mouthpieces, and the agenda-pushing lies have gone on for far too long.
But the announcement was greeted with relief from some elected officials, who have struggled to hold off the faction of protesters who have engaged in looting.
“I don’t know what the answer is, but there has to be some type of response because it’s only getting worse out there,” Patricia Bynes, a black Democratic committeewoman for Ferguson Township, said on Saturday. “People are fed up with police brutality and police harassment. There is still so much racism and discrimination in this region, ingrained in the business world and the communities. This is what happens when institutional racism continues.”
Not to be unsympathetic, but I take offense to the race card being waved around when alleged redneck racists are under just as much threat. But all that is down the memory hole, as is Salisbury and Georgia.
The shooting is being investigated by the Justice Department. Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been flooding into Ferguson, seeking witnesses. Locally, the case is being handled by the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, but there have been calls to have the case shifted to a special prosecutor, in part because of criticism that Mr. McCulloch has not been rigorous in prosecuting law enforcement officers in high-profile cases.
Since last Sunday, Ferguson has seesawed between extremes: order and unrest, protests and looting.
It has seen peaceful demonstrations by day and often ugly clashes at night between highly militarized police officers and angry protesters calling for justice for Mr. Brown. On Thursday, President Obama urged an end to the violence and the governor ordered the state Highway Patrol to take over security from local law enforcement.
Residents have taken to the streets each day, holding placards condemning what they say is a long history of harassment and abuse of African-Americans at the hands of the largely white Ferguson police force. Groups of people have silently confronted police officers, facing them with their hands in the air, as witnesses said Mr. Brown did before he was shot.
And late at night, a small number of unruly people in the crowd have turned violent, smashing shop windows and stealing hair supplies and liquor.
And WHO BENEFITS when GRASS ROOTS PROTESTS are DISCREDITED?
Who benefits when MARTIAL LAW can be invoked?
For several days, television networks have replayed clips of people looting, burning down a convenience store and throwing glass bottles and gasoline bombs at heavily armed police officers, drawing comparisons to scenes from a war-ravaged city.
Why not bring it out into the open? The authorities have been at war with the American people for years, nay, decades now if not centuries. Let's just be the dictatorship we are, no mask, no nothing. Just stop it with the human rights blather and lectures to get us into more wars, 'kay?
Earlier, Chief Jon Belmar of the St. Louis County Police had dismissed the idea of a curfew, saying that such an action would not hinder people determined to cause violence, while negatively affecting residents engaging in innocent activity, like walking home from the bus stop after a late shift of work.
But Mr. Nixon, increasingly desperate to bring the situation in Ferguson under control, said he embraced the tactic reluctantly.
Earlier Saturday, in a new sign of discord among the authorities over the handling of the investigation into Mr. Brown’s death, the Justice Department said that it had opposed the release of a video that the Ferguson Police Department said showed the teenager apparently involved in a robbery at a convenience store.
Wow. Eating each other now. The hallmarks of a collapsing government.
The Justice Department asked the Ferguson Police Department not to release the video because of concerns that “it would roil the community further,” a United States law enforcement official said on Saturday.
Oh, no.
The Ferguson department released the video on Friday and the Justice official said it “occurred over the objection of federal authorities.” The official said a copy of the video had been in possession of federal investigators, as well, “and there were never any plans by the federal investigators to release that copy.”
The dispute showed further divisions among the authorities in the handling of the case. The surveillance video appeared to show Mr. Brown stealing a box of cigarillos. Shortly after the release of the video, Captain Johnson expressed his displeasure, saying he had not been told that the police planned to release it.
I was told boxes at first, but why quibble about details?
Mr. Brown’s family and many protesters accused the police of trying to harm the teenager’s reputation and to divert attention from the officer who killed him. The police have said that Officer Wilson was not aware of what had happened at the convenience store when he encountered Mr. Brown. The police identified the officer for the first time on Friday; he has been put on administrative leave and his whereabouts were unknown. Neighbors on his block in Crestwood, a suburb of St. Louis, said that he left his home several days ago and has not been seen since. On Saturday, the house appeared deserted, the blinds in the windows closed tightly.
On Friday night, hundreds of protesters returned to the streets in anger over the shooting and the handling of the investigation. The confrontation between the police and demonstrators, the first serious one since the Highway Patrol assumed responsibility for security operations, ended at about 4 a.m. when the authorities, prompted by the gradual dispersal of demonstrators, pulled back to their nearby command post.
Print ended there, and the controlled opposition co-option is obviously getting out of hand, what with those "angry" protesters. Let the mind-massaging message continue.
The renewed protests were apparently triggered by the actions of the authorities, who have been wrestling for days with how to balance public safety with the right of demonstrators to assemble. Ferguson police on Friday had named Brown as the prime suspect in a convenience store robbery that occurred just before the shooting, and they released a video of the robbery. The footage showed someone they identified as Brown towering over and menacing the store clerk, images that were circulated nationwide and drew a sharp rebuke from Brown’s family.
The video’s release also drew criticism from the Missouri highway patrol and came over the objections of federal authorities, a law enforcement official told CNN on Saturday. The Justice Department had said that distributing the images would heighten tensions in the community, but Ferguson police released it anyway, the official said.
As has been the case the morning after each night of violence, residents took to the streets Saturday morning to help businesses owners clean up broken glass and other signs of destruction. Business owners and workers were upset both at the looters and also at the state highway patrol. They said officers did not intervene during the looting and had not offered any help afterward, with cleanup or investigating the incidents.
You know why that is, right? Because POLICE AGENTS were the ones doing the looting! No need to investigate when you know who it was and what mission they were on.
‘‘They said they’re not going to do anything,’’ said Jay Kanzler, the lawyer for Ferguson Market, a liquor and convenience store that was the site of the robbery allegedly committed by Brown prior to his shooting, which was looted on Friday night.
The Associated Press reported that one law enforcement official had been injured overnight.
Ferguson continued to draw African-American leaders, who appeared at protests and held prayer vigils. On Saturday, dozens of clergy members, including the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and hundreds of people, including residents from Ferguson, greater St. Louis and beyond, gathered on Canfield Drive, the street where Mr. Brown was killed, in front of two makeshift memorials decorated with candles, stuffed animals and flowers.
Agenda-pushing instigators!
“We choose futures over funerals,” Mr. Jackson said.
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"Amid tension in Ferguson, shooting ‘broke camel’s back’" by Tanzina Vega and John Eligon | New York Times August 17, 2014
With all due respect, I saw this article, for some reason there is no switcher issue.
FERGUSON, Mo. — Garland Moore, a hospital worker, lived in this St. Louis suburb for much of his 33 years, a period in which a largely white community has become a largely black one.
He attended its schools and is raising his family in this place of suburban homes and apartment buildings on the outskirts of a struggling Midwest city. And over time, he has felt his life to be circumscribed by Ferguson’s demographics.
Moore, who is black, talks of how he has felt the wrath of the police here and in surrounding suburbs for years — roughed up during a minor traffic stop and prevented from entering a park when he was wearing St. Louis Cardinals red.
And last week, as he stood at a vigil for an unarmed 18-year-old shot dead by the police — a shooting that provoked renewed street violence and looting early Saturday — Moore heard anger welling and listened to a shout of: “We’re tired of the racist police department.”
“It broke the camel’s back,” Moore said of the killing of the teenager, Michael Brown. Referring to the northern part of St. Louis County, he continued, “The people in North County — not just African-Americans, some of the white people, too — they are tired of the police harassment.”
The origins of the area’s complex social and racial history date to the 19th century when the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County went their separate ways, leading to the formation of dozens of smaller communities outside St. Louis.
As blacks moved into the city and whites moved out, real estate agents and city leaders, in a pattern familiar elsewhere in the country, conspired to keep blacks out of the suburbs through the use of zoning ordinances and restrictive covenants.
These days, Ferguson is like many of the suburbs around St. Louis, inner-ring towns that accommodated white flight decades ago but that are now largely black. And yet they retain a white power structure.
Although about two in three Ferguson residents are black, its mayor and five of its six City Council members are white. Only three of the town’s 53 police officers are black.
Turnout for local elections in Ferguson has been poor. The mayor, James W. Knowles III, noted his disappointment with the turnout — about 12 percent — in the most recent mayoral election during a City Council meeting in April.
Patricia Bynes, a black woman who is the Democratic committeewoman for the Ferguson area, said the lack of black involvement in local government was partly the result of the black population’s being more transient in small municipalities and less attached to them.
There is also some frustration among blacks who say town government is not attuned to their concerns.
Aliyah Woods, 45, once petitioned Ferguson officials for a sign that would warn drivers that a deaf family lived on that block. But the sign never came. “You get tired,” she said. “You keep asking, you keep asking. Nothing gets done.”
Moore, who recently moved to neighboring Florissant, said he had attended a couple of Ferguson Council meetings to complain that the police should be patrolling streets to try to prevent break-ins rather than lying in wait to catch people for traffic violations.
This year, community members voiced anger after the all-white school board for the Ferguson-Florissant district pushed aside its black superintendent for unrevealed reasons. That spurred several blacks to run for board positions, but only one won a seat.
The St. Louis County Police Department fired a white lieutenant last year for ordering officers to target blacks in shopping areas. That resulted in the department’s enlisting researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, to study whether the department was engaging in racial profiling.
Ferguson’s police chief, Thomas Jackson, has been working with the Justice Department’s community relations team on improving interaction with residents.
Although experience and statistics suggest that Ferguson’s police force disproportionately targets blacks, it is not as imbalanced as in some neighboring departments in St. Louis County.
While blacks are 37 percent more likely to be pulled over compared with their proportion of the population in Ferguson, that is less than the statewide average of 59 percent, according to Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
In fact, Rosenfeld said, Ferguson did not fit the profile of one that would be a spark for civil unrest. The town has “pockets of disadvantage” and middle and upper-middle income families. He said Ferguson had benefited in the last five to 10 years from economic growth in the northern part of the county, such as the expansion of Express Scripts, the Fortune 500 health care giant.
“Ferguson does not stand out as the type of community where you would expect tensions with the police to boil over.’’ Rosenfeld said.
Hmmmm!
But the memory of the county’s racial history lingers. In 1949, a mob of whites showed up to attack blacks who lined up to get into the pool at Fairground Park in north St. Louis after it had been desegregated.
In the 1970s, a court battle over public school inequality led to a settlement that created a desegregation busing program that exists to this day.
A Ferguson city councilor caused a stir in 1970 when he used racially charged language to criticize teenagers from the neighboring town of Kinloch for throwing rocks and bottles at homes in Ferguson.
The councilor, Carl Kersting, said, “We should call a black a black, and not be afraid to face up to these people,” according to an article in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
You didn't know that?
--more--"
I will let them prove it to you:
"Boston marchers protest killing of Ferguson teen; React to shooting of black Mo. teen, police response" by Jeremy C. Fox | Globe Correspondent August 16, 2014
People marched from Copley Square to Boston police headquarters Saturday to protest the fatal shooting in Missouri of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer and local law enforcement’s subsequent military-style response to demonstrators.
I've seen that somewhere before, or a reasonable facsimile.
Chanting slogans such as, “Hey hey, ho ho, police brutality has got to go,” the diverse crowd marched peacefully down Dartmouth Street and Columbus Avenue, numbering a little more than 100 initially but swelling to twice that.
Boston police monitored marchers and held traffic for them. “The protest was peaceful in nature, and no arrests were made,” said Officer James Kenneally, a spokesman.
The civil interaction contrasted with relations between police and the public in Missouri and in other incidents cited by protesters.
Chelsea resident Leondra Hawkesworth said she was “fed up” with seeing young black men killed by police.
“It’s got to end somewhere,” said Hawkesworth, 24, who wore a T-shirt remembering D.J. Henry, a Pace University student from Easton fatally shot by a Pleasantville, N.Y., police officer in 2010.
Hawkesworth works with Henry’s family to spread awareness and to plan events in his memory, she said.
“It bothers me mentally to see these families without their family members, and they have the potential to be something great,” she said.
Bothers me, too, and so do all the war dead.
Michael Brown Jr., 18, was shot and killed last Saturday by Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson, Police Chief Thomas Jackson told reporters Friday.
In announcing the officer’s name, Jackson also released documents alleging that shortly before his death Brown had stolen a box of cigars from a convenience store, shoving a clerk on his way out the door.
The timing of the allegation reignited anger within the black community of the St. Louis suburb, where protests again turned violent early Saturday.
Later in the day, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew in Ferguson.
During the Boston march, pedestrians stopped to observe, and many along the route stepped out onto sidewalks to see and photograph the throng.
When marchers with raised hands chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” some lifted their open palms in solidarity.
As protesters neared police headquarters in Roxbury, Mission Hill resident Tripp Diaz began the chant, “If we don’t do this every day, these racist pigs won’t go away.”
That's strong stuff.
“I’m just angry because a lot of people feel like this [expletive] doesn’t happen anymore, or they just dismiss it like it doesn’t exist,” Diaz, 24, said in an interview.
Look, if the cops kill you in AmeriKa I'm sure they had a very good reason. The kid stole cigars. His life deserves to be forfeit. Did us all a favor.
--more--"
"Police defend use of military-style equipment; Civil rights debate grows amid Ferguson protests" by Milton J. Valencia | Globe Staff August 17, 2014
The photographs and video images of armored vehicles and billowing tear gas, of explosions, of officers donning gas masks and armed with assault rifles made Ferguson, Mo., look like a battleground.
“This is America, not a war zone,” US Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a tweet, echoing concerns of public officials and civil rights groups from across the country.
Not Gaza is it, Liz?
The level of firepower that law enforcement officials demonstrated over the last week in response to the protests in Missouri has become a growing concern of civil rights groups, which see it as the militarization of local law enforcement agencies that are supposed to build community partnerships.
As I wrote yesterday, my concerns for years were ignored, insulted, and ridiculed, and yet I was right. I take no pleasure in typing that.
“It is similar to what we’re seeing nationwide, that there is an increased militarization of our state and local police officers, in terms of the tactics they’re using and the equipment they’re using,” said Jessie Rossman, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
Hundreds of people have stormed the streets of Missouri to protest the questionable police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, and police said they had to quell violent rioting and looting at the onset, but the deployment of military-style equipment has reignited the debate over the arming of state and local police departments.
That debate will die down; the oppression from it will not.
Local law enforcement officials can obtain surplus military equipment from the Department of Defense, or can seek grants from the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice, among other agencies, to purchase equipment.
I didn't want to pay for that. I'd rather it went for food stamps.
Massachusetts State Police Colonel Timothy Alben defended the use of federal programs that transfer surplus military equipment to local departments. He said he could not comment on the police action in Missouri, but said State Police have had access to critical military equipment, such as specialized all-terrain vehicles, for use in search and rescue operations and during natural disasters.
“This is the type of equipment State Police or local agencies would never be able to get their hands on if they had to pay for it,” Alben said. “I think every police department of any size in this country has to have a tactical response capability for any event.”
Civil rights groups argue that local departments have increasingly obtained specialized military equipment for use in day-to-day, localized law enforcement operations such as community policing and in drug arrests.
We warned against that, but did anyone listen?
And, the weapons have become more available under terrorism responses since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The root of tyrannical evil in the 21st-century, that false flag inside job by USrael.
Rossman said many local communities aren’t even aware of some of the weaponry their departments are obtaining because there is never any public input period.
Transparency and data collection is a one-way street in AmeriKa.
“I think what we’re seeing is that communities are outraged when they realize they don’t know what’s being done with their tax dollars,” she said.
I think we $en$ed it.
In Massachusetts alone, 82 police departments and other law enforcement agencies between 1994 and 2009 received more than 1,000 weapons from the Department of Defense, including 486 fully automatic M-16 machine guns and 546 semiautomatic M-14s, according to an ACLU state study released in June. The report, “Our Homes Are Not Battlefields: Reversing the Militarization and Federalization of Local Police in Massachusetts,” recommends several reforms, such as better oversight in the deployment of certain equipment.
The study found that while the State Police received the most weapons, small, suburban communities such as Wellfleet and Duxbury also obtained machine guns.
The town of West Springfield, with a population of just over 28,000 people, received two grenade launchers from the Department of Defense, according to the report. And police departments received “peacekeeper armored vehicles,” hundreds of other military-style vehicles, and large marine craft.
The Metro Law Enforcement Council, a regional SWAT team from the Boston area, maintains its own BearCat armored vehicle, which it used in drug arrests. The agency also applied to the Federal Aviation Administration for a drone license.
I'll bet they get one, too.
The report also documents the application of military-style policing in a neighborhood in Springfield and the militarization of SWAT teams in drug raids, with flash-bang grenades and battering rams. In one tragic example, a heavily armed police officer fatally shot 68-year-old Eurie Stamps, a grandfather, during a drug raid in Framingham in 2011. Stamps was not the target of the raid, and the officer accidentally shot him while subduing him.
Hey, shit happens.
The local police chief later disbanded the SWAT team; a review showed that the team lacked certain training.
Alben argued that every local department should have some type of tactical response ability, “whether that be for an event like the Boston Marathon, or the school shootings across this country.”
Both Sandy Hook and the Marathon have proven to be total hoaxes. Sandy Hook never happened, and the Marathon was crisis drills gone "live." All this tyranny based on lies, and why?
He also noted the prevalence of high-powered assault rifles and shotguns that police encounter on an increasingly routine basis demonstrates the need for the specialized police raids.
And yet gun control laws are at record highs. WTF, scums?
Alben agreed with the need for regular, updated training for the use of the specialized equipment but pointed out that departments participate in regional teams, such as the Metro Law Enforcement Council.
He said each department should be able to determine its own needs but would not say whether small departments have the need for equipment like tear gas.
The Amherst Police Department was criticized last year for the use of tear gas to disrupt college student celebrations after the Red Sox World Series victory.
And that is about the most liberal city in the Commonwealth!
John Collins, general counsel for the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, said he could not comment on how police in Missouri handled the protests, but defended the deployment of specialized equipment when needed.
“If you have a situation where it’s appropriate to use that, where things have gotten out of control and you’re putting police officers in harm’s way, a lot of things are appropriate,” he said. “That’s the reason we have training, that’s the reason we have policies.”
Related: NYC Cops Out of Control
He tried to bum a cigarette?
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